Annotationen:The Constructivist View of Communication

Argumentation2
In his book “Constructing a Language”, Tomasello explains that it is “the ability to share attention” that furnishes the basis for the inception of meaning. It is the sort of claim that seems obvious the moment it has been stated. But because the whole problem of attention had for a long time been ignored by psychologists, its role in language acquisition was not acknowledged. From the constructivist point of view, it is important to stress that it does not matter if the thing I perceive when I follow the direction in which the other is looking is not quite the same as the thing he or she perceives. What DOES matter, in order to link a word to a percept, is that, whenever he or she utters a specific word, I see something that I can consider the repetition of what I saw on similar previous occasions. The crucial feature is the coordination of attention.

Argumentation2
Linguists have only fairly recently used more descriptive terms such as “agent” and “patient”. The entities these terms designate were included in the large grammatical categories of subject and object. In linguistics, these terms refer to parts of a sentence and in no way to parts of anyone’s experience. Subject, verb, and object are syntactic terms and refer to the structure of sentences, not to the links we have created among the things we perceive and live with. It was a long-standing tradition in linguistics to separate syntax from semantics, as though the two domains had nothing to do with each other. In my view, it was this rigid separation that made it very difficult for linguists to develop a viable theory of language acquisition.

As Tomasello and a few before him noticed, Children do not produce their utterances with the help of grammatical rules. Even adults rarely rely on abstract syntactic rules to guide their speech. They know how they have segmented their experience and the praxis of living has shown them useful ways of linking the segments.

In many cases it is simply the way the connection between experiential elements has actually been made that determines the kind of link between them. Let us assume that your attention is caught by the color red. As such the redness is not confined, has not yet a specific shape in your visual field, and is not a discrete thing. But as you focus on it, you are able to fit the color into the pattern you have learned to call “house”. If you were asked to describe what you see, you would most likely say: “there is a red house”. You choose the adjectival connection because the color and the thing were produced in a continuous application of attention. If, on the other hand, you recognize in your visual field a pattern that fits your concept of “house” and only then, scanning it more closely, you focus attention on its color, you would most likely say: “the house is red”. This syntactic structure clearly expresses that the concept of “house” was brought forth independently of the color that was subsequently attributed to it.

Argumentation2
In any case, what translation shows is that there is no one-to-one correspondence of conceptual links and linguistic markers. In my view this confirms my assumption: We all develop a repertoire of conceptual items and connections, and learn to fit them to the syntactic structures that have become customary among the users of a given language. The fit is only approximative. If the meanings we have in mind when we speak, and those that are suggested to the listener by our utterance, are essentially subjective, communication is possible only because the experiences from which these meanings have been abstracted are as a rule fairly similar among the speakers of one language. The individual differences of meaning are such that they rarely cause serious disturbances in the everyday use of our language. But, of course, there are exceptions. An experience I had when we came to live in the United Sates in 1966 is a good example. A young man was helping us to move furniture on the first day in our new house. When he was leaving, I heard him say to my wife: “See you later.” I was taken aback and looked at her rather questioningly. We were familiar with the English of Dublin and southern England; and there, the temporal relation indicated in this particular idiom by “later”, was strictly limited to the ONE day and night. It took us some time to learn that for speakers of American English it seems to include an indefinite future.

Innovationsdiskurs2
But because the whole problem of attention had for a long time been ignored by psychologists, its role in language acquisition was not acknowledged.

Innovationsdiskurs2
It was a long-standing tradition in linguistics to separate syntax from semantics, as though the two domains had nothing to do with each other. In my view, it was this rigid separation that made it very difficult for linguists to develop a viable theory of language acquisition.

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
Heinz von Foerster had a knack for statements that sounded paradoxical. In fact, they made a lot of sense when they were unpacked. At the very beginning of our joint recollections in “Wie wir uns erfinden”, a book we published together a few years ago, he said for example: “It’s the listener, not the speaker, who determines the meaning of an utterance.”

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
The condition, that meaning must be made before it can be used, was not explicitly shown until Claude Shannon published his Theory of Communication in 1949. Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory” is a technical document covering engineering problems such as the design and capacity of communication channels, the interference of noise, and the use of redundancy in interpretation. Right at the beginning, however, Shannon makes a fundamental point that has enormous consequences for the understanding of how linguistic communication functions. His fundamental insight was that MEANING does not travel. In order to transmit something from one place to another, it must have the form of a “signal”. A signal is something that can travel through space.

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
Norbert Wiener used a very simple example to illustrate communication and the role of the widely abused term “information”. Flower shops, he said, can send flowers anywhere in the world, without sending the flowers. They send them by cable. This was long before e-mail, and telegraphy was the way to do it. Flower shops had an international code that listed a variety of flowers and good wishes in the left column and a number, say between 1 and 100, in the right column.

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
Norbert Wiener tentatively suggested the fundamental feature of the pragmatic approach long ago when he discussed communication in different species of animals and with strange people. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. (1948, p.157)

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
In his book “Constructing a Language”, Tomasello explains that it is “the ability to share attention” that furnishes the basis for the inception of meaning. It is the sort of claim that seems obvious the moment it has been stated.

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
Tomasello stresses a second factor that is even more important: “… the ability to understand that other persons have intentional and mental states like one’s own” (2003, p.40). He speaks of “intention reading” and this implies, among other things, the desire to anticipate what the other is going to do.

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
As Humberto Maturana expressed it: “A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner: what happened once will occur again. Its organization (genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works.” (1970)

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
Even Skinner’s behaviorist notion of reinforcement implicitly requires the organism to anticipate that what had a pleasant result in the past will have a pleasant result in future, and that what had unpleasant consequences will have them the next time. The fact that this anticipation probably is not conscious in rats and pigeons – or even in my late poodle – does not stop me from using the anticipatory pattern as a description of their behavior; because at higher levels of cognitive development it certainly IS conscious and leads to deliberate action.

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
In his book on the attainment of consciousness (La prise de conscience, 1974), Piaget showed two things on the basis of a series of empirical studies carried out by members of his team. First, consciousness appears gradually in children and, second, its attainment in one context does not necessarily entail its presence in others.

WissenschaftlicheReferenz2
Tomasello has made a solid case for the idea that “intention-reading” plays an important role in children’s acquisition of word-meaning, that is, of semantics. I now want to suggest that anticipation is a key factor in the development of syntax.